Stylish but barely mediocre overall

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

The tone from scene to scene is a bit all over the place for the most part. The writing is mostly weak, yet the acting really hides MOST of it. Sharon Stone, Lawrence Fishburne, and Shia Lebouf are all standouts, not many people get their time to shine though, which is a bit sad with such a talented cast. A great handful of characters could have easily been cut.The soundtrack is great but at times feels like a bit much, the composed score on the other hand is really damn good. The editing and cinematography are also quite uneven.Overall, the movie is like I said "Uneven" it's not a complete mess, it's quite entertaining to watch, the ending is the best part of the film so I suggest sticking around with this one.

The movie is about the assassination of Bob Kennedy. Instead of the main character, the focus is on the people who got wounded on the night when the incident happened. With the exception of a few cases which include some blurry or from the back images, the scenes involving Kennedy are the actual news and camera footage from his speeches and public appearances. In that respect, the movie feels like a documentary wrapped inside some fictional drama. This is certainly a different kind of storytelling by which the director implicitly gives a cross-sectional view of the society of the day. Those low-profile background events are actually displayed on the foreground until the expected happens. Despite the originality of its narrative, the film misses its mark. The stories of those wounded people flow on separate unconnected or artificially connected streams, which are reminiscent of soap operas. The characters as well as their stories are pretty dull and unengaging. The visual effects that blend the original video footage to movie scenes however, are quite successful.

The short answer to the question above is yes but maybe not how you might think: you never wonder who is that character even though you have seen the character before. The actual problem is that the characters feel underdeveloped because you focus on a character for an average of less than 6 minutes. There is no sense in doing a 2 hour movie with so many main characters.The idea of different kinds people meeting is used many times in different films with changing success. This time some of the people include a singer who is an alcoholic, her husband, a retired hotel doorman, the hotel manager, his wife and lover. The 22 characters are all at the Ambassador hotel for their own reasons during the shooting of Robert F. Kennedy. Some work there, some used to work there, some are guests and some are working on the Kennedy campaign.Like I mentioned in the beginning there are too many main characters. They could have just had less characters because some of the story lines just felt pointless. There were some interesting characters but they were crushed by the short amount of time that they had. The ending was a bit weird: of course all the characters that clearly seemed like they were dying ended up surviving (especially the Elijah Wood character seemed already dead). I know that the director Emilio Estevez meant well with the story but he perhaps failed by taking more stories than he can tell (or most directors to be honest). Some of the dialog wasn't that excellent but it was never anything truly horrible. The actors are great and are perhaps the best thing about the movie. The directing wasn't spectacular but it didn't make it worse. Bobby was a movie with a lot of potential and good acting but it didn't meet with my expectations.

The best part of Bobby is probably the ending. This is not to say the rest of the movie is bad. In fact, far from it. But the touching voice over of Robert Kennedy in the last 10 minutes of the movie exceeds the rest of the movie.The movie, in fact, is not much about Kennedy. It is about the inhabitants of the Ambassador hotel in the days leading up to the assassination. The ensemble of actors have done a wonderful job. Despite the large number of intertwining story lines, the director has done a good job of pulling us into the lives of each of the characters. There is the hotel worker, who, despite retirement cannot stay away from the hotel, and his fellow (old) friend. Then there is the soon to be bride, who is marrying a boy so that he may not be sent to the lines in the war. A starlet who has to perform at the ceremony, and her fractious relationship with her husband. The two campaign workers, who in the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination, feel that Robert Kennedy may represent the last true hope for a peaceful Ameria. Among others, the cast of actors include Anthony Hopkins, Emilio Estevez (who also directed), Demi Moore, Helen Hunt, Martin Sheen, Elijah Woods, Sharon Stone, William Macy.The culmination of the movie and Robert Kennedy's voice over makes you wonder, what just might have been, if both the Kennedy brothers had ruled the most powerful nation in the world. We would never know the answer to that, unfortunately.